Follow the stuff that cities, counties and states build to attract and keep factories, jobs, stores, planes, colleges, tourists and residents.

Mortgage and Work

About this blog

By Brian Leaf

If they build it, will they come? Thatís the question reporter Brian Leaf answers by following the stuff that cities, county and states build to attract and keep factories, jobs, stores, airplanes, colleges, tourists and residents to burgs and
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If they build it, will they come? Thatís the question reporter Brian Leaf answers by following the stuff that cities, county and states build to attract and keep factories, jobs, stores, airplanes, colleges, tourists and residents to burgs and Ďburbs throughout the region.

A person is in his mid-fifties. He and his wife have owned their own home (actually their second home) for a number of years and there’s only a small mortgage left to pay off. The money in their home represents a big part of their retirement savings. After retirement, some of the money realized from selling their home and downsizing is going to be used to supplement their Social Security and 401(k) (which has not rebounded to the same extent that the rest of the Market has). However most of the money will be saved to help pay for senior care: assisted living, a nursing home or in-home help.

People read about the housing market crash, about people with underwater mortgages and foreclosures. However, they don’t think that the housing crash has affected them. In their minds, their modest house worth $200,000 before the crash is still worth about $200,000. They don’t realize that their house, if they could even sell it, is only worth about $130,000, a third less than it was.

Millions of people who played by all the rules, who didn’t speculate and who didn’t buy more house than they could afford have lost a third of their savings. Some don’t even realize that if they had to sell their house today, they couldn’t.

Sometimes people say, "Oh yeah, I know what you’re saying, but I just read the housing market is up." They don’t realize how many years it’s going to take for the market to fully recover, to get back to 2007, for that $200,000 house to be worth $200,000 again.

Once again, average Americans are the losers and once again the One Percent is the winner.

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The average American white collar worker has lost about a quarter of his salary and he either doesn’t know or he’s so happy to have a job he doesn’t care.

His whole life he has been working hard (still among the most productive workers in the world) and he realizes that he is barely keeping up. That does bother him. He’s received raises over the years, but with every raise there was a giveback. He’s had to pay more for his health insurance. Dental and optical coverage were dropped completely. He lost his company’s life insurance. Now, bonuses are only for the super rich. He’s lost his pension and in many cases, he still doesn’t realize the so-called pension substitute, his 401(k), is a joke.

Back in the day, he worked forty hours a week and had two-plus weeks of paid vacation and a designated number of paid holidays. He remembers reading in school that people died in the streets to secure the eight-hour day and the forty-hour week. Now he works fifty hours a week with no traditional paid holidays or vacation. Americans have gone from having a lunch hour that allowed one to disappear for up to an hour to shop and have a leisurely lunch, to lunch at one’s desk. People show up and start work early and often stay late.

However, the real change came with the ubiquitous laptop and Blackberry. Now, everybody works from home, works on the commuter train or takes phone calls while playing with their children. It is not uncommon for even hourly, part-time employees to answer emails at home. Someone once told us that if he didn’t keep in twice daily touch with his office even on vacation he’d lose his job.

It seems to us that if someone works more that forty hours a week either at his desk, at home or on vacation he should be paid it.

For the last thirty years, American workers have been so afraid of being downsized, outsourced or forced into early retirement that they have meekly allowed themselves to be ripped off.